


Ficlets Bindup

by mightyscrub



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen, M/M, short oneshots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 15:32:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7177496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightyscrub/pseuds/mightyscrub
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt fills and other short fics that have nowhere else to roam.  See author's notes at the heads of chapters for individual descriptions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Happy Birthday (Snake/Otacon)

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: hmmmmm maybe otasune? with hal surprising dave with a cake?? or cupcake? :o (from creamhearts, thanks <3)
> 
> for dave's birthday, yay! pre-relationship fluff

It was a simple mission, but even simple missions could take awhile when you were being careful, and Philanthropy was always careful.

Snake could smell himself unpleasantly as he walked down the last hallway to his and Otacon’s shared apartment, having worn this same t-shirt and jeans for almost five days, flitting from one side of the city to the other to lose any tails. He’d left the rest of his largely depleted supplies in his last crappy motel room, so the prospect of a shower now as he came to their door number was tantalizing to say the least.

Quaintly, the previous tenants had left a welcome mat outside the door that said _Home is where the heart is_ , and he and Otacon had kept it because they occasionally had the same sense of dark humor.

Snake knocked Shave And A Haircut on the door, then three more knocks for their personal touch, so Otacon would know it was him and no one else fiddling with the lock.

Despite being gone for almost a month, he entered without much fanfare. Otacon was at his computer desk in the corner of the living room and just glanced over his shoulder to ensure that it was, indeed, Snake walking in, before going straight back to his code. A working Otacon never turned around until he was finished.

Nevertheless, he said “Hi.” Snake also said “Hi.”

Snake was tired. He slouched over to the open kitchenette, where Otacon had left him a clean sweatshirt and sweatpants folded on the center island, a little welcome home gift. There was also something else. A little box of clear plastic with an enormous cupcake inside, some fancy specialty bakery ordeal with sprinkles and everything.

“There’s a cupcake here,” Snake declared.

“It’s for you,” said Otacon, still typing. “Got it when you were away.”

“For me?”

“I just realized… It’s been about a year since we started doing this.”

“This meaning Philanthropy.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“So, what? An anniversary dessert, Otacon?”

“Oh come on.” Otacon finally finished and spun around to face him, his chair emitting a wheezing squeak. “If it’s been a year then one of those days must’ve been your birthday. It’s a belated birthday present.”

“Hm.” Snake picked up the little box and turned it in his hand. Brown wrapper, yellow cake, absurd amounts of chocolate frosting. There was more frosting than cake, jesus christ.

“Even legendary heroes were born sometime,” said Otacon.

“You could probably argue the semantics in my case.” 

“It’s just a cupcake, Snake, geez.”

The idea of that probably buttermilk frosting was a little nauseating after subsisting mostly on chalk-like protein bars for a few days, so he gingerly set the box back on the table and instead watched Otacon closely.

“What?” Otacon asked, suspicious.

“… Nothing.”

Otacon looked like his regular old self, all the familiar details clicking back into clarity after a few weeks separated. In the blueish glow of his computer screen, his glasses were somewhat reflective, but Snake could just make out the outline of his eyes, returning Snake’s gaze. “Welcome back, by the way,” Otacon said. “It’s been awhile.”

“Yeah, I guess it has.”

Otacon adjusted his glasses and smiled lopsidedly.

Without much preamble or decency, Snake started to change right there in the kitchen, earning a scoffing noise from Otacon who turned back to his computer more for modesty than actual work. In Snake’s defense, he neatly piled his dirty clothes in the hamper outside their little entryway laundry room—something Otacon was rather bad at, thank you very much.

Feeling cleaner than he had in awhile in the new sweats, Snake returned to the kitchenette to fish his cigarettes out of their token drawer, then opened the little window over the sink to smoke leaning over the counter. He’d run out of cigarettes on his mission, and this first puff of nicotine felt like a godsend.

A creak of Otacon’s chair announced that he was getting up to join him. He came and stood silently across the sink from Snake, tapping his fingers against the counter idly.

“I have something I want to say,” Otacon announced, palm going flat and jaw set.

“Alright,” said Snake, listening.

“If I could take back my involvement at Shadow Moses I would do it in a heartbeat.” Otacon looked at him and his eyes were fully visible in this light, kinda wedged into heavy lids and early crow’s feet like a basset hound’s. “But at the same time…”

“You don’t regret how it turned out,” Snake finished.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“A year, huh…” Snake reached to tap ash over the edge of the windowsill. “A year older for both of us. You don’t look a day over…” The sentence petered out.

A smile. “You have no idea how old I am.”

“Well, I don’t see any candles on that cupcake.”

“Touché.”

Stealthily, Otacon had picked up the cigarette box and was equally stealthily putting it back in its drawer. Touché indeed.

“It’s a little selfish but I’m glad I met you,” Otacon told him softly.

The cigarette was flavorless and cheap, just tasted like fire at the back of Snake’s throat as he stood there with it hanging from the corner of his mouth. He clapped a hand onto Otacon’s shoulder, squeezing firmly.

“You’re talking like we’ll never see each other again,” he said. “Let’s make it a few more years, Otacon.”

Otacon’s nerves melted into a quick chuckle and Snake took his hand away. “Alright. Sounds like a plan, Snake. But when’s your real birthday, huh? We can celebrate for real next time.”

Snake smiled sharply. “You’re the information guy. You figure it out.”

“You’re the worst,” Otacon said, and it sounded like a compliment.

He crossed his arms and stood there in silent companionship, his eyes on Snake as he smoked, time going slow and lazy for awhile.

_Home is where the heart is_ , or something like that. Snake smiled at his own private joke and flicked his spent cigarette butt out the window.

“Litter,” said Otacon blandly.

“And by the way, happy birthday,” said Snake. “You were also born at one point.”

“Happy about it every day,” Otacon said, cheerfully facetious, but when he passed Snake to return to his computer, they brushed shoulders somewhat and the smell of their shared shampoo filled Snake’s nose.

Snake was happy too.

x


	2. Cigarettes (Solid Snake Gen)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: I would really love a story about Dave as a child being shuffled around in foster care or when he was still trying to make connections with his families/friends. (from 141-point-12/thelonebamf. Thanks!! :D)
> 
> Kinda depressing. Smoking tw, blood tw

David smoked his first cigarette when he was nine years old. Sort of. Mostly choked on it.

At the time he was in a house with two other boys—Brady, who was a year younger than him, and Marco, a big chubby twelve-year-old who ruled the joint. Elaine, their foster mother, smoked but very carefully, always taking her well-wrinkled pack out to the back porch and forbidding the boys to follow her, citing things like emphysema and bronchitis and other scary words the boys didn’t particularly care about, and yet here’s the secret:

She kept the pack in her en suite.

One day when she was asleep in the basement watching tv, Marco led the boys through her bedroom to the nookish bathroom and pulled out the cigarette pack from amidst its cosmetics brethren. The boys all looked down at it like it was the holy grail of sin.

It’s funny how kids equate sin with adulthood.

Marco, as the leader, removed a single cigarette and started messing with the BIC lighter set on Elaine’s vanity.

“Hurry up,” said Brady.

“It won’t fuckin work,” said Marco. He’d never used a lighter before.

David was the guy at the door, watching through the bedroom for any sign of Elaine.

“ _Hurry up_ ,” Brady repeated.

“Would you can it? Hah!” Marco had produced his little flame at last. He held the end of the cigarette over it reverently, rolling it, like toasting marshmallows. Smoke emitted from the tip. “Who’s first?” Marco asked. “Dave, c’mere. You first.”

Obediently, David stepped back into the bathroom and Brady swapped positions with him like clockwork, taking the doorway. Marco offered the cigarette with an enormous grin.

David took it and pressed it into his mouth, paper snagging on chapped lips, and he wasn’t entirely sure what to do after that except Marco was watching him expectantly and he didn’t want to disappoint. He took a deep breath.

Fire. The taste of burning, clearing his sinuses, curling at the back of his throat like the feeling when he was sick and had a scratchy cough. Speaking of which—he coughed, and couldn’t really stop for awhile. Marco laughed at him.

“How is it?” Marco asked, looking at David like some kind of wonder.

“I don’t know,” said David, and handed it back.

Marco was next, now that the poison-tester had given his ok. He also coughed, “cough cough shit! cough”. But he seemed appreciative about it.

They passed it between the three of them, Brady scrunching his nose wickedly, until it was about halfway burned up. That was about as far as they could go.

“You feel like a man?” Marco asked them, as he put everything away with immense care. The cigarette he extinguished and stuffed in his back pocket to get rid of later, in a less conspicuous spot.

“I feel sick,” said Brady, who’d only had two puffs.

Marco waved a dismissive hand at him and watched David.

David shrugged. “I don’t know,” he repeated.

“Dave’s the only man around here, probably,” said Marco.

They snuck back out of the bedroom warily, like a line of small soldiers.

x

Another thing Marco dragged them to was baseball games.

They had a spot where they could watch for free, with a far-off but reasonable vantage point of the field.

After the cigarette adventure, they aired out the ashy phlegm in their throats by walking there, two blocks and then up a grassy hill to a gate overlooking the game. They didn’t dare climb over it and actually weasel their way closer to the field, but if they peered through the wire they could make out the players like blips of colorful radar on the diamond.

David’s favorite team was playing, but you wouldn’t have guessed to look at him. He was quiet as always, except maybe he was watching through the wire more closely than usual.

Marco and Brady chattered amongst themselves through the first inning, Marco citing his expert sports knowledge for the younger boy’s supposed benefit. It was a nice day out, not too hot. They might stay the whole game, Marco said flippantly, because that was his decision usually.

Then as the second inning started, it all went to shit.

Some guy… a teenager, slouched up onto their hill and stood watching them from afar for a moment, toeing the ground in a jittery sort of way. These looks soon turned to leers, and Brady was the first to notice and grow discomfited. Marco and David ignored it, because they didn’t know what else to do.

Then the teenager whistled through his teeth.

“Hey fatty,” he said. “Come over here.”

Marco was sweating slightly just from the warm day, but his face went gray now, clammy. David watched him out of the corner of his eye.

“I said come over here,” said the teenager. “You gonna make me come getcha?”

Slowly Marco turned around. “Let’s go home,” he mumbled to David, who nodded.

The three of them crept away from the gate, heads down, hoping to walk right by the teenager if they didn’t make eye contact. But the guy reached out a gangly arm and heaved Marco over by the back of his t-shirt. Marco let out a soft strangled gasp of a sound.

“I oughtta beat you up or something,” said the teenager, clearly enjoying himself with this sport. “I mean. You kids are stealing yourselves a baseball game. Where’s your tickets?”

“Please let me go,” said Marco.

“I oughtta whup you. Teach you a lesson.”

“We won’t come back, ok?”

The teenager yanked Marco back by his shirt and gave him a slap across the back of the head, just enough to smart. There was a sort of vacant excitement in this stranger’s face. An empty person with nothing else to do but cover something up with the pain and fear of others.

Marco whimpered.

Marco was the boy David shared a bunkbed with, and then the little bed on the opposite wall for Brady. All one room, nestled up in each other’s night mumblings, talking secrets and cowboy shows, and then silence as David often stayed awake the latest, just listening to the other boys breathing quietly. Marco was their fearless leader. He swore and he helped David with math sometimes, the useful kind of math he knew like baseball statistics.

Here Marco looked scared, not savvy at all, just a kid, fat and sweaty and trying to get away but the teenager had him by the back of his shirt still.

“Where you headed, bigshot?” the teenager leered. “Crooked bastard. You gonna watch the game or not? Fight for it, punk.”

He let go and let Marco lurch himself face first into the dirt. The teenager planted a boot on his butt and rolled him over with a dull kick.

“Fight for it,” the teenager repeated. And then he called Marco a bastard again, which was exactly the truth, shamefully enough.

Useless unwanted kids.

Tears were welling up in Marco’s eyes and he glanced up at David like some sort of signal. Take Brady and run for it.

But David didn’t. Something was welling up in him, something indescribable and fierce.

“Call him a bastard one more time,” David said suddenly.

The teenager cocked an eyebrow at him, looking completely thrilled. “What’s that, kiddo?”

“Do it.”

“ _You_ gonna fight me?” The teenager laughed high and crackingly, turning his head to spit then grinning back at David. “You gonna fight for your _bastard_ brother?”

That was all it took. It unlatched the gates, and then suddenly David was barreling at the older boy full force, a skinny little demon with fists swinging, and hell he didn’t fret about any of this fucker’s weak spots, he punched him straight in the groin and the belly and when the guy keeled over David sat himself on top of him and beat at his face.

Thunk thunk thunk thunk, his small fists falling again and again into hard face, his hands hurting. The teenager was wailing curses, blood was smearing out of his nose, blood was spraying in little specks, blood was on David’s hands.

“Dave stop it!” Marco’s arms hooked under David’s armpits and he dragged him off breathlessly. “Dave!”

David spat at the bully, who was sitting and scrubbing furiously at his bleeding nose, as Marco heaved him backwards with difficulty. Marco wasn’t the strongest boy.

“Dave, _come on_.”

It was time for their getaway. Brady was crying, and that realization broke the spell, made Dave’s eyes shoot around the scene and finally land at his own busted knuckles.

Marco gave him a fortifying pat on the back, and then the three of them booked it, ran like hell, didn’t even have to signal each other. They already knew to fly.

They all didn’t stop running until they were back at Elaine’s.

The guy with the bloody face was too stunned to pursue them.

x

Elaine very rarely sweared, but everything was ‘damn well’ when she lectured David later.

“You’re damn well lucky that boy’s parents aren’t pressing charges for assault. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you could be in right now? You’re damn well in the attic tonight.” And the rest.

The attic was technically the guest bedroom, but sleeping up there was also a punishment because of the drafts and all three boys’ inexplicable lonely aversions to the room. Elaine locked him up there, and he sat on the bed with his arms wrapped around his knees, back to the wall, eyes keen on the room. Even at nine years old, an unfamiliar bedroom on your own can have ghosts in it.

Sometime after dinner (which he got skipped for), somebody knocked at his door, earnestly, annoyingly, and then with a clunk the door swung open. It was Marco, and David slipped out of bed to meet him furtively.

“Here,” Marco whispered. “I brought something for you to practice.”

He handed David four prim cigarettes and the BIC lighter.

“You’re gonna be up here with me if Elaine finds out you swiped these,” David said slowly. “Either that or underground.”

“Whatever…” said Marco. His face was kinda red from coming up the stairs, the curls on his forehead blacker than usual with sweat. He was shifty-eyed all of the sudden, sheepish. “We’re as close to brothers as we’re gonna get, right?”

David closed the gifts into his palm. “I guess so.”

“You saved me. I owe you one.”

David was pretty sure ‘brothers’ weren’t supposed to owe each other one but he didn’t say anything. Maybe this was how _their_ sort of brotherhood worked.

There was blood under his fingernails, black grime that he couldn’t wash out completely, but somehow still David was young and a little afraid of the dark on his own. Maybe the burning cherry of a cigarette would help make the night up here feel safer.

“Thanks,” David told him.

Marco grinned and clapped his shoulder roughly. “Teach me how to fight, yeah?”

David was ashamed but he also didn’t want this moment to end so he said “Ok.”

David never did teach him, though. They went about their usual lives, and then some brief months later David left for a different home, a sort of bureaucratic shift he was never told the details of. He wondered if it had something to do with his fight.

There was a lot he and Marco and Brady never said to each other. Kids aren’t good at goodbyes. It didn’t really register until later that he’d never see them again.

Another house. Another crowd.

Other ‘brothers’.

He kept the last one of Elaine’s cigarettes in his shoe, until he smoked it later, and then his last connection to his old home faded, ash and a wet orange cigarette butt in the dirt. It didn’t hurt as much as it ought to.

Maybe that’s what they call a smoking buzz.

x


	3. Whoops (Snake/Otacon)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: A story about philanthropy era Snake and Otacon getting caught by a cop making out in the back of their shitty car in a Costco parking lot because they couldn’t afford a motel (from bigbops, thank you, this mental image is beautiful and I am moved)

The plus side to living out of the car was that passersby were more likely to judge them for that than for the spectacularly dark hickeys.

It’s not like either of them were at their sexiest, sink showering in gas station bathrooms and, in Hal’s case, wearing the exact same hoodie for an indeterminable number of days, but they also didn’t exactly have much else to do in between drives other than necking each other. It was kind of a prolonged blue ball experience, because actually getting off would mean losing precious clean laundry and also driving the next day in a car that smelled vaguely like sex. So they got very good at just teasing each other and being very frustrated about it.

Maybe it was a vicious cycle.

Their thinning reserves of cash were funneling entirely into gas right now, meaning when they did stop overnight it was to park and pull down the back seats into the trunkspace to sleep. Tonight, they eased onto an exit with a comforting number of fast food signs, sometime after 10pm, not entirely sure where they were on the scale from quaint city neighborhood to suburbia. All they really needed was a Costco (or, as the dim letters read, “Co tco”), an expansive parking lot they could park at the very back of.

It was not glamorous. The backseat was cramped for two grown men, even with the trunkspace, and they wound up awkwardly curled up together, seatbelt buckles in ribs. Hal was in a top-heavy combination of his omnipresent hoodie and a pair of boxers (he always slithered out of his pants for bed), facing the back of the driver seat, his glasses safely in the glove compartment up front.

Dave was behind him, a bulky presence preventing him from rolling over, and a blanket was over them, a thin veneer of modesty. It was awkward and constricted.

But it wasn’t so bad to feel Dave’s fingers play at the corner of his hood. Hal wasn’t sure what he was doing back there, until Dave pulled the hood aside enough to place a very deliberate kiss under Hal’s ear. Ticklish, Hal made an entirely unattractive snuffling sound.

“That’s not how you sleep,” Hal told him.

“It’s not,” Dave agreed, pressing another kiss further down his neck, encroaching on territory that was already thoroughly tender from previous activity. He snuck an arm around Hal’s middle, hand splaying across Hal’s chest to fiddle with one of his dangling hoodie drawstrings. Dave always had to be doing something with his hands, it seemed.

“Stop playing with me,” Hal mumbled.

“Do you want me to stop?” Dave asked, stopping.

Hal’s arms wrapped around Dave’s arm loosely. “No…”

“Do you want me to keep going?”

That was a tough question, because Hal had been the one driving today’s last leg, and he was pretty tired. But he could also feel Dave’s breath against the side of his face, and a part of him would always want this wherever he could get it.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Please.”

Dave shifted closer, pressing overly hot against Hal’s back, and Hal could feel half-hardness in Dave’s jeans against his ass. Careful. The kisses to his neck continued, slow, precise. They reversed direction and trailed up under his jaw, which was stubbled but collecting hickeys at a fine rate anyway.

Hal sighed, his lips parting in anticipation, and then Dave’s arm around him was fortifying him so Hal could roll and half-face him, so their lips could find each other clumsily, tongues and teeth. Hal was framed by hard muscle, the stale smell of Dave’s t-shirt but also the deodorant he’d been using to mask the no bath days, and this all would be disgusting in retrospect probably, once they were in another apartment with real hygiene routines again, but for now Hal could only associate that deodorant’s smell with these furtive touches and the feeling of being pulled up against Dave’s broad chest and kissing him.

Hal himself was notorious for boney elbows and Dave let out a grunting oof of a noise, muffled by their lips together, as Hall accidentally got him in the ribs.

“Sorry,” Hal mumbled, breathless and sexually frustrated and still enjoying it. What would this turn into when they _did_ have an apartment again? And a bed? The thought made a pleased hum rumble at the back of his throat, and Dave’s hand was at his back now, fingers still flexing and fiddling.

All of the sudden Dave stopped, and that hand went flat and strangely protective.

“What?” Hal asked, a little blearily. He wasn’t the sharpest when he was horny.

“Thought I heard something,” Dave said, and the rasp in his voice made goosebumps shiver down the back of Hal’s spine. Definitely horny.

“You’re just being paranoid,” Hal told him, and began sucking at Dave’s bottom lip with determination.

Dave was about to relent, his posture melting again, but then a light was shining in their eyes through the window. Tap tap tap. Somebody was knocking.

Shit.

Hal could feel his face going spectacularly red, and Dave, in some sort of ridiculous protective gesture, flopped the corner of the blanket over Hal’s head. Thanks, Dave. Helped with hiding.

Dave himself somehow managed to get into a sitting position and scoot close enough to roll down the window. It was manual—this car was shit—and the slowness of the process was agonizing.

It was a cop with a flashlight.

Hal wasn’t wearing actual pants, which wasn’t usually a problem since they woke up and left the parking lots before people were about anyway, but he also had something close to an erection and this entire situation was horrible.

“Officer,” said Dave, with an amazingly steady voice, and Hal could perfectly picture his business face.

The officer sounded pretty put-upon, like he was used to teenagers doing this, but probably not men in their thirties.

“Gonna have to ask ya’ll to leave,” the guy said, with a twinge of a drawl in his bland Midwestern accent. “With a warning, fellas, but this is a nice neighborhood. PG rated, please.”

Hal was pressing his face into the seat and trying to die.

“Sure thing,” Dave said, and doubtlessly watched as the officer returned to his car across the way.

Since Dave was the one dressed, he disentangled himself and climbed out the door, looping around to the driver’s seat and plucking the keys out of the glove compartment. He revved up and began driving them to a different parking lot for the night.

For a moment the bump and rumble of the car in nighttime silence was the only sound.

“Oh my god,” Hal said finally, still blanket-covered in the back seat.

A quiet hoarse rumble of a noise. Dave was laughing.

“You’re awful,” Hal moaned.

“I mean, at least we made his night interesting.”

“ _David_.”

“Could have been worse. Locked up for terrorism because we were getting frisky.”

“Stop. I’m begging you.”

Dave did stop, but when Hal finally poked his head out again, Dave shot him a quick grin in the rearview mirror.

“I hate you,” Hal said miserably.

“Hate me tomorrow. Go ahead and get a start on that sleep.”

“How long are you gonna drive?”

Dave shrugged a shoulder. “I’m pretty awake now.”

“… Me too.”

“Then how about you tell me a story?” Dave stopped at a stoplight (it was the time of night now when they just flashed red), and fished out his lighter and a cigarette from the glove compartment as well. He cranked down the window and the crisp night air wafted in, the freshness rather highlighting exactly how stale it was in here.

Hal lay with his cheek smooshed near a seatbelt.

“Once as a kid I hacked a vet’s office to make sure my neighbor’s dog was ok there overnight.”

“Tell me that story.”

So Hal did, and they drove.

x


	4. Thighs (Big Boss/Ocelot, NSFW)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little AU PWP where the whole premise is "what if Ocelot joined MSF and also worshipped BB's thighs." That's it, that's the story.

Adam was between his legs, which should have been rather straightforward but John was noticing this was not at all what he had expected.

Well, firstly, he’d never expected much of anything. John had urges, sure, but he was a master at quick self-satisfaction, treating orgasm almost like a routine chore before getting on to more important things. In the military it was normal enough to be cramped all up in each other’s space, so if you noticed your roommate masturbating in the bunk above you, you just ignored it and went on with your own damn business. This was true at MSF. This was true for much of John’s life.

Yet meeting Revolver Ocelot again changed a lot immediately. He’d kept in contact with Adam, at least whenever they could, sharing strangely personal conversations that somehow included a lot more small talk than details about their respective careers. John never even told Adam where he was, which made it all the more impressive when Ocelot plum showed up on his doorstep during a recruitment in Puerto Limon. They hadn’t actually seen each other’s faces in years, but it was impossible not to recognize Adam.

He was still young, but something had mellowed about him. A softer face despite the glint of steel ever present in his eyes. His hair had gone a platinum gray, still short but longer than a military crew cut, and a perfectly trimmed mustache curled above the grin on his lips.

He was handsome.

“I’m looking for a pirate,” Adam had said proudly. Kaz was immediately suspicious, but something must have shown on John’s face that lowered his hackles.

Things got complicated after that.

They’d never actually worked together officially, but somehow Adam quickly made MSF his home, and as for John there was something strangely comfortable in the clicks of Adam’s spurs and whiffs of his aftershave when he passed by… Their rivalry kept everyone on their toes, yet Adam had a charisma that inspired deep loyalty. He quickly developed a team of fans.

… John wondered if _he_ counted as one of those fans.

From the moment Adam arrived, the tension was there. John would… notice things. Like the glimpse of Adam’s sun-kissed chest through the low collar of his shirt. A certain smirk. A lingering of their hands when passing documents between each other…

And now here John was, pantsless on his cot with Adam kneeling between his legs, fully clothed and with a wicked smile even by his standards. Yet there was fondness in that smile as well, and that’s what made John glance away and clear his throat.

“Well… Do what you want…” he muttered.

Adam’s gloved hands squeezed at his thighs, before one trailed up across John’s stomach under his shirt. It was only a fleeting touch, however, before both hands were back at John’s legs… Adam seemed to have a fixation with them, or maybe was just excited to touch the only part of John that was bare.

John’s cock was right there, already half-hard, but Adam ignored it except to puff out a little laugh through his nose, the breath ghosting over John’s balls.

“You kept me waiting a long time for this,” Adam teased. The leather of his gloves warmed as he massaged roughly into the meat of John’s thighs, thick muscle hardening under his touch instinctively. John trusted Adam but his body still had to learn that.

John grunted noncommittally, and closed his eye when Adam pressed a kiss to his inner thigh, just to the side of his crotch. Adam’s mustache tickled… John’s back arched slightly as the kiss turned sucking and rough. He grunted again, this time with his heart starting to pound in his throat. His instinct was to pull away… There was a deeply ingrained defensiveness in him, as Adam’s hands slipped across his legs, John’s small hairs catching at the red leather.

“You’re amazing,” Adam mumbled against his skin. He lifted and trailed smacking kisses agonizingly farther away from John’s cock, a careful line up the curve of his muscle to the underside of his knee, lifting John’s leg with a deceptively sturdy arm.

“Don’t be embarrassing.”

“I’m not. Just honest.” Adam’s tone was irreverent, but there was something worshipful in his actions, slow and savoring. He held apart John’s legs under the knees and simply looked down at him, eyes tracing him the same way his fingers had, all the way up to the trail of hair rising up to the curve of John’s belly under his shirt hem. John had leaned back on his elbows to facilitate this, and when Adam slowly pushed forward, John allowed himself down fully, his back to the itchy blankets with Adam rising on his knees to crane over him.

Adam set John’s legs over his shoulders with a triumphant sneer, and began kissing his inner thighs again, his hands trailing down their undersides to John’s ass. He palmed John roughly, earning a startled noise that made Adam laugh. The bright happy sound made John’s stomach tighten. It wasn’t often Adam was so honest about things like joy and indulgence.

His breath was coming more roughly as Adam’s thumbs coaxed apart the cheeks of his ass and fumbled blindly, rubbing over places John had never shared with anybody.

His whole torso jerked, with a warning and authoritative “ _Ocelot_.”

But Adam was not humbled, not here. He locked eyes with John as one smooth gloved finger flicked back and forth across John’s asshole.

“Don’t you think I’m kind, Boss?” His head was lowering, a vaguely awkward shuffling of his position on his knees but he made it look somehow lithe and catlike, same as anything. He was grinning like a cat too, but also had a flush on his cheeks, under the tan and sunburn. A certain wild glee in his eyes behind the utter content.

“Just get on with it.” John was alarmed by his own breathlessness, as Adam smacked kisses down his thighs again, fingers digging harshly… John’s muscular stomach was shaking under his shirt, the muscles in his thighs quivering against Adam’s cheeks, the tickle of Adam’s mustache… “Please,” John added, with ridiculous politeness.

Adam glanced up across his belly with an uncharacteristically soft look, utter affection.

Then he took John’s now rock-hard cock deep into his mouth.

John was quiet by nature, but the pleasure roiling in him, making his knees reflexively want to come together, made his breath come out in rough huffs. He covered his face with his hand, gripping his own hair as Adam rolled his head, cheeks caving, tongue flat and wet against the underside of John’s cock… John wasn’t used to being touched like this, and certainly not the deep pleased hums in the back of Adam’s throat, alongside lewd wet noises and half-gags. He was really going for it… his hands were bruising in the curve where John’s thighs met his ass…

“Adam…” John let it slip, a choked moment of intimacy, breaking the rules, and Adam’s throat swallowed a few times and cleared before taking John the deepest he had yet…

John was close to coming. He had to say something didn’t he? A warning. But as if reading his mind, Adam pulled back to lick roughly across the sensitive head before letting John fall out of his mouth completely.

John was a sweating mess, heart hammering, breath ragged. He lifted his hand enough to blink blurrily down at Adam smiling between his legs. John groaned and his pelvis lifted slightly off the bed of its own accord, aborted little thrusts, his ass always falling back into the palms of Adam’s hands…

“I want you to ask for it,” Adam croaked. His voice was raw, wrecked but somehow entirely commanding.

John swallowed dryly. “Please…”

“Please what?”

“I want… Please let me…”

“What?” Adam was enjoying this far too much.

John made a rough frustrated noise and growled, “Cum.”

Adam was quick to comply. The heat of his mouth, the constriction of his lips, the roll of his tongue… Without warning, John’s breath hitched and he came down Adam’s throat.

Adam massaged his ass and then his thighs through the last thrumming waves of orgasm, slowing to gentle strokes along his legs, gentle pets. When he lifted his head, his mustache was somewhat awry, and John would have laughed (a rare thing) if he’d had any air in his damn lungs. There was a wetness on Adam’s chin that he wiped away primly on the back of his glove before gently extricating himself from under John’s legs.

He stood, and gestured at John with a flick of the wrists and loose finger guns.

“You owe me one, Boss,” he said. It sounded like a love confession.


	5. Otaku Convention (Hal + E.E. Gen)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Young Hal and Emma go to an anime convention. For thelonebamf !!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chock full of anime references tbh orz I suppose it's something of an AU but one where their family is fucked up in about the same ways.

Somehow they got lost finding a convention center 30 minutes from their house.

It was a nice day to get lost at least, not as hot as full mid-summer, but the sunshine through the windshield was still enough to make Emma’s thighs stick to her seat at the hem of her shorts.

Hal had turned off the music (a home-burned cd of anime openings) because apparently it helped him see the road signs better. They’d wound up on some backroads, nonthreatening but definitely looking more and more like country, and they passed by a dead deer on the side of the road with its legs sticking up awkwardly amidst some shrubbery.

“Oh dear,” Hal said absently and Emma snorted.

“Are you joking?”

“Er,” said Hal, which was answer enough that he was just that distracted at the moment.

She could tell he was chagrined that their last grand brother-sister hurrah before he went to college was off to such a rocky start, but strangely Emma couldn’t bring herself to care that much. To her it was all kind of… funny.

Hal never seemed to understand that the convention wasn’t as important as just spending the day with him.

She watched him for a moment as he frowned ahead. His black Neon Genesis Evangelion t-shirt was probably a size too big and his hair was growing out again, curls all over the place. He had the barest hint of stubble on his upper lip and at the point of his chin, those tiny bits of left-the-house-too-early-to-properly-groom scruff.

Maybe to most people he wouldn’t look like much, but to be fair Emma knew she looked the same way. Or at least she felt like it. While Hal would be leaving soon for higher education, Emma was near the end of middle school, awkwardly aware of growing yet not growing quick enough. She had belly rolls that pressed against her shirt and she never quite knew how the other girls looked so much better all the time. You had to be skinny, and if you weren’t you had to be fashionable, and Emma was neither of those yet. She sweat too much in her armpits and didn’t know what to do about it. She always missed shaving a certain tiny patch of hair under her knees. It felt like there were one million tricks to being a girl and she knew none of them.

It didn’t help that her mother was always chastising her for this ignorance, or trying to impart knowledge too quickly. One night recently Mom had been in a weird fuss and made Emma sit in the bathroom so she could apply her daughter’s first makeup with no prior warning. The version of Emma in the mirror afterwards was undeniably prettier and Mom was very pleased about it, saying “You’ll have all the boys’ attention” and things like that. But Emma was for some reason overwhelmed. The face in the mirror was too nice, it wasn’t her at all, and she didn’t even want the attention of boys.

Stupidly, she’d started sniffling, and she couldn’t quite find the words to explain why when Mom panicked.

They hadn’t tried makeup since.

“I’m gonna need a navigator, Mr. Chekov,” Hal said, still frowning.

Emma smiled and consulted the page of hastily written directions in her lap.

“Are you sure you left the highway at exit 13?”

“Positive.”

“Not 14 or 12 or 100?”

“Yup.”

“And we still haven’t found Horse Creek Rd?”

“Nor any horses nor any creeks.”

Emma read through the directions again, almost absently, certainly not expecting to find anything new, but then noticed something that made a pall of embarrassment fall over her head.

“Uh. Pull over, Hal.”

“What? Is something wrong?” He was high-strung, bordering on peevish, and Emma suddenly wanted to sink into her seat and disappear.

“I missed telling you,” she said. “We were supposed to get on a smaller highway and take exit 13 from _there_.”

So in a way she’d been the one who caused him all this anxiety. It was an all-too familiar feeling, this conviction that she was just too stupid to understand obvious things about being grown-up, unable to function like anything bigger than a kid…

But Hal laughed.

“We’re so dumb!” he said, but he was clearly relieved.

Of course… Hal always fretted more over problems than outcomes.

And of course Hal wouldn’t blame her, would he?

He turned up their anime music again and did a u-turn.

“We might miss the kaiju panel but the masquerade’s the important part, right?” he said.

Tentatively, Emma smiled.

Her brother had a way of making even a kid feel pretty useful.

x

The convention center was tucked between a swath of hotels and a Steak N Shake (why was it always a Steak N Shake?), and they knew they were in the right place the moment some guy walked by with a giant foam sword on his shoulder.

Secretly, Emma had always wanted to cosplay, but she’d never known how to breach such a topic with Hal who didn’t show much interest in it himself.

Plus Mom would never approve. Especially since Emma mostly wanted to cosplay the bishounen she had crushes on rather than the attractive lady characters. Mom would get pretty apoplectic about that.

Despite the civilian garb, Emma and Hal were both decked out for a day of hardcore nerding: t-shirts, shorts, tennis shoes, matching fanny packs containing snacks and their Gameboys (and, in Emma’s case, a Rock Lee keycharm hanging from the zipper). Emma’s ponytail was stuffed through the back of a baseball cap designed like the Pokemon Red protagonist’s. Once they were parked and Hal’s dumpy old Honda was locked up, they were thoroughly ready for action.

By chance, they pushed up their glasses in unison and chuckled a little about it.

Since they’d arrived later than planned, the line for registration was stupid long, but it wound through the artist’s alley so they had plenty to look at while they were waiting.

“Alright,” Hal said finally, once they were done perusing a basket of fanart buttons. “Since we’re late we’ll need to revise our gameplan.” He opened their printed schedule. “If we’re in line about 30 minutes, that’ll leave us two hours before the masquerade. The dealer’s room opens in one hour… Thoughts, E.E.?”

Emma kept asking him to call her by her real name instead of her childhood nickname, but he always forgot. It was probably like her trying to call Huey “Dad” or something.

She pressed against his side to read the morning panels.

They had indeed missed the two-hour kaiju special, but…

“Dealer’s room, then swordfighting demonstration?” she suggested.

“I like it,” said Hal.

It was easy to like things like swordfighting and monsters around Hal, partly because those were also things he enjoyed. Where Mom would frown strangely seriously at Emma being the token nerd girl in a group of guy friends, Hal was always proud of Emma’s extensive knowledge of computers and video game trivia.

Maybe that was why it was such a relief when Hal said things like “Swordfighting, huh? I bet you’re secretly learning how to kick my ass.”

“There’s not much ass to kick,” Emma replied, grinning.

“Language,” Hal chastised.

“You said it first, you nerd.”

“Yeah, but I’m older. I’m allowed to.”

The line passed a booth selling some fanmade t-shirts, and Emma found herself ogling one in particular.

It was a Gundam Wing shirt. Hal insisted GW wasn’t exactly a contender in the greats of Gundam canon (and Emma would probably agree with him), but the show did have some… very attractive anime boys. It was Emma’s main fandom right now after Naruto, and certainly her shippiest.

The shirt’s decal was of Deathscythe, the mech piloted by Duo Maxwell, otherwise known as half of her OTP and also her current hottest anime crush.

Doki doki, as they say.

Her wallet was burning a hole in her fanny pack.

But when would she ever wear the shirt? Did she have the courage to be that openly nerdy at school? Maybe… But she certainly didn’t have the same guts to wear a giant robot shirt in front of Mom, especially knowing it was for yaoi reasons.

That was just about the stupidest it could possibly get, right? That wasn’t how women like her Mom behaved, and that was exactly the sort of woman Emma was supposed to be. Not some kid.

But Hal was nervously talking to the cute girl behind the counter all of the sudden. He got awkward in front of cute girls his age.

“Uh. How much are the t-shirts?” he asked.

Emma’s face was as red as his.

The cute artist girl smiled benevolently at both of them and said $35.

It was a bargain.

Hal turned to Emma with a pursed sort of trying-not-to-look-too-excited smile.

“You’ve got enough?” he asked. “Or do you need me to spot you a twenty?”

Of course he knew, he could read Emma like a book. He probably even knew about the fanfics she had secretly bookmarked on the family desktop.

It probably didn’t even occur to him that she might be embarrassed or feel stupid about something she liked. He was kind of dense like that.

But then again…

_He could read Emma like a book._

Maybe this was his way of fortifying her before he left.

Her fingers briefly clutched the Rock Lee on her bag, then with one bold ZIP she stuck her hand in to find her money.

She accepted his twenty, and bought her first merchandise of the day before they even had their badges.

x

Emma and Hal had always got on like peanut butter and jelly. It probably helped that Emma had been so young when Mom and Huey married, but there was also just something important about Hal, a certain quality of attentiveness that Emma hadn’t really experienced before in her childhood. He was the first person in the world to ever give her a piggy-back ride.

Now that they were older, this translated into the perfect nerdy friendship.

After getting their badges, they played Pokemon in the hallway waiting for the dealer’s room to open, a connection cable hung awkwardly between them as Emma showed off her impressive Blaziken to the demise of Hal’s Torterra.

They had a game plan for the dealer’s room. Once it opened, they went immediately to stock up on Japanese snacks, then conducted a rather scientific study of the room’s overview before zeroing in on the gunpla stand.

They got some mystery boxes, then they each bought some DVDs. Emma got the entirety of Blue Seed while Hal got one of the Sailor Moon movies. He had always liked Sailor Moon more than Emma did, partly because of his lingering secret crush on Sailor Jupiter.

With their wallets comfortably emptied, they went outside to sit in the dry scratchy grass and pick through their snacks in the summer heat.

They taste-tested each of the packaged breads they’d bought. The melon bread and cream bread were both delicious, but they agreed the red-bean paste had a weirdly processed flavor, paling in comparison to the mochi Hal would sometimes drive into the city for, or the taiyaki at the botanical gardens’ yearly Japanese festival.

Hal’s glasses fell off plum into their snack bag and came out smelling vaguely of the dried squid jerky.

The swordfighting demonstration was exciting as to be expected, and then came the masquerade, the best cosplays flaunted around onstage to cheers and hoots from the audience. Hal and Emma elbowed each other conspiratorially every time the announcer mispronounced the name of a popular anime character.

Hal’s favorite outfit was a huge robot fabrication for Transformers, but Emma couldn’t decide between the billowing robes of princesses or the attractive bishie skits. One woman on the stage boldly cosplayed a fem Goku from Dragonball Z, his open shirt design exposing a risky amount of cleavage but she worked it well. Emma rather hoped to be a girl like that one day.

When they left the crowded ballroom, Hal perched a hand on top of Emma’s hat and steered her through the people that way, utilizing his gawky height. When they were at last in a more breathable hallway, the same hand slid down to her shoulder and jostled it playfully as he grinned down at her.

It was a warm feeling.

Her brother was her best friend.

x

They were waiting in the hallway for another panel to open up (this one was about the importance of scientific accuracy in science fiction), leaning against the wall outside the door, weighted down by their bags. Emma had put on her new Gundam Wing shirt over her other one, a somewhat sweaty configuration but worth it.

She and Hal were talking rather than playing Pokemon now, both of them smiling broadly and poking fun at some of the stranger sights of the day.

Then a group of boys walked past.

They looked about Hal’s age. They weren’t in cosplay at all, and something about the way they glanced snidely around the hall said they weren’t the friendliest types of fans either.

One of these boys stared long and hard at Emma, so that her smile died nervously.

Something about his expression was… uncomfortable. It made a tightening sickness happen in her stomach, which also felt pudgier than ever. His eyes trailed down to her bare legs.

He whistled at her, and his group of friends laughed.

It wasn’t so bad, right? But the way they were looking at her reminded her of something that made her feel even sicker.

A couple years ago, when she’d just started shaving her legs, her father had had friends over…

These science men, she’d wanted to impress them with her brains like she impressed Hal, but when she entered the living room to be introduced, her mother clamped manicured claws into her shoulder and presented her with a weirdly uncharacteristic sort of pride.

“She’s a pretty thing, isn’t she? If she was only a few years older, right? She’ll be quite the woman.”

Her mother was selling her to these middle-aged men and the way they looked at her made tears prick at the backs of her eyes and her heart go wobbly.

She didn’t want to be pretty.

Being pretty meant people looked at you like _that_ , meant her own mother carting her around like a hunk of meat, as if ready to take the highest bid…

One man in particular had had the most disgusting look on his face, and that expression was exactly what she thought of here and now with this group of nerd boys leering at her.

Hal took her wrist very firmly.

“Come on, E.E.,” he said loudly and dragged her away.

The group of boys didn’t follow them of course, but Emma felt like she was a brittle shell full of shivering useless goop.

She couldn’t be a kid but she couldn’t be an adult either.

Nothing felt good.

Hal took her to a quiet hall outside the bathrooms, and they stood in silence for a moment, his hand still holding her wrist. Emma stared down at her shoes, urging herself not to do something stupid like cry. Her face was so red.

Hal was clearly upset.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m sorry, E.E., I should have said something more. They had no right to treat you like that.”

“No,” Emma said feebly. She didn’t want a scene.

Hal made a frustrated noise. “Men are complete shits,” he said bitterly. “Don’t pay attention to them, they’re all shits.”

Emma rubbed the heel of her palm under her glasses, his hand rising with her wrist, and knocked her head against his arm. “It’s fine…” he mumbled.

“It’s not!”

“I mean, _I’m_ fine.”

She tried to give him a small smile but he still looked angry. He looked almost as shook up as she was.

“Besides, _you’re_ not a shit,” she told him, hoping to change the conversation.

But that somehow made things worse. His face froze strangely, his eyes going very dark.

“… No,” he said softly. “All men are shits.”

“I’m ok, Hal, really.”

She carefully extricated his hand from her wrist and that seemed to break whatever spell was on him, because he sighed long and heavy.

“Are you sure?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m having a really good day.”

He pulled her into a hug and she tried not to cry again, this time from how relieved she was to have him here with her.

x

Despite the hitch, they finished the day off with style.

After a few more panels, they picnicked out on the green again, snacking excessively in lieu of an actual lunch. Emma made herself into a walrus with two sticks of pocky, and Hal tried to make himself a dinosaur in the same vein but his mouth wasn’t big enough and he just turned out looked dumb and making Emma laugh her head off.

As the events died down and people began to disperse, a mass exodus of brightly colored wigs and fake weaponry, Emma and Hal just sat there on the grass and people-watched, comfortable in companionable silence.

Emma rested her hands on her fanny pack, twirling the little Rock Lee between her fingers.

“I always wondered why you liked Rock Lee so much,” Hal said conversationally. “He’s not your usual type.”

It was true. Emma always went for the pretty boys.

“I don’t have a crush on him or anything, he’s just important to me,” Emma said.

It would be too weird to say _He reminds me of you_.

After the briefest pause, she unclipped the keycharm from her bag and held it out to Hal with an air of great circumstance.

“Here,” she said. “Take him with you to college.”

Hal adjusted his glasses, staring down into her hand.

“Are you sure? You’ve had him for so long.”

It was true. Rock Lee’s face was half rubbed off from traveling on zippers for so long. Emma’s purse, her backpack… He’d even spent some of his life just sitting on her desk, smiling determinedly as she did her homework.

But she bobbed her hand urgently until Hal accepted the little figure. He examined it between his fingers.

“Thanks, E.E.,” he said, with a bit of wonder. “I’ll be thinking of you.”

Emma would be thinking of him too. It already hurt knowing he would be so far away for four years…

She stuck out her chin. “It also means you have to come back home to return him when you’re done,” she said firmly.

He laughed, his eyes crinkling behind his glasses, warm and familiar.

“Alright. Fair is fair.”

They grinned at each other, perhaps a little shyly.

It was always awkward for step siblings to say things like I Love You.

But the meaning got across.

They sat together and just talked for another hour.

That was Emma’s favorite part of the day, really.


	6. On the Roof of Hell (Vkaz, Solid)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Master Miller reacts to Solid Snake killing Venom. Warnings: Major Character Death, obviously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the ever fabulous and VKaz-iest kawaiibooker!! Read Jess' VKaz fics they are much better than this xD
> 
> Ok, I kinda played myself because I wrote this all out before refreshing on the original MG games... My first mistake was that I thought Venom was the one in MG2 and it all kinda spiraled into canon-illiteracy from there lol So this is almost like a weird AU, some sorta frankenstein combination of MG1 and 2, focusing more on the characters than on... the plot making sense lol I hope ya'll can take it as it is xD
> 
> And please read all kawaiibooker fics holla

Booze helped.

These days it seemed like he was in a constant dulled alcohol haze, never enough to threaten his functionality or his work but enough that his brain had a ring of fuzziness around it where awful realities could get caught before making their way fully inside.

His students and colleagues mostly chalked any change in behavior up to the well-known moodiness of Master Miller. But of course, David noticed.

David always noticed.

It reached a point where he started hovering, as if stoically waiting for “Master” to swoon like some damsel, and finally with no little irritation Kazuhira invited him to an evening chat in his quarters.

He had to tell him.

In their secret preparations for Solid Snake’s trip to Zazibarland, Kazuhira and David’s casual routine of late chats into the night over alcohol and cigarettes respectively had grown scarce. But when David arrived in Kazuhira’s rooms, he did so with the familiarity of having been there many times before.

They sat across from each other in straight backed chairs. The small table was off to the side, both men preferring to sit knee to knee unobstructed. There was a bizarre intimacy in it.

David, as always, lit a cigarette, and Kazuhira, as always, uncapped a large heavy bottle of very hard liquor.

“I need to talk to you about this mission,” Kazuhira said, pouring his first drink.

“I expected as much,” said David. “Are you going to tell me it’s a suicide mission?”

Kazuhira scoffed. “Maybe for some people, but not you. I’m not about to lose faith in your abilities now.”

David’s lips thinned, not quite a smile but he was pleased.

He already looked so much like his “father,” the same jaw, the same eyes. 

Which meant he also looked like…

Kauzhira downed his first drink in three big gulps, ignoring the way the burn made his eyes water.

“I have reason to believe the warlord in Zanzibarland isn’t really Big Boss,” he said hoarsely, pouring himself another sloshing drink. “He’s a decoy. A body double.”

David was fittingly alarmed, but it was a testament to his training that he didn’t show it, despite his youth. His face went rigid but he took a moment to process the information, his intelligent eyes calculating. “If you know this, you need to tell Campbell,” he said finally.

“It makes no difference,” Kazuhira muttered. “The mission is the same. The man in Zanzibar… He’s as good as Big Boss now.”

Those words hurt more than the alcohol could possibly mitigate.

Kazuhira couldn’t seem to muster the energy to bring his glass to his lips, frozen suddenly in memories of sea-smell and the rigid routine of the military combined with an indescribable feeling of comradery and… belonging. Something that could never be matched in civilian life. How was it that he always thought of the Diamond Dogs now when he thought of home, instead of MSF? No, that was a stupid question. There was an obvious difference.

He saw that face in his memory again, with its small, unimposing smiles, somewhat off-kilter amidst rugged features… _He_ had Big Boss’ face, and yet to Kazuhira’s memory it was entirely different.

It was kind.

And it was his. It loved Kazuhira in a way Big Boss never could or would.

“Fuck,” Kazuhira mumbled, and threw back another throat-burning mouthful.

David watched the whole while. Ever loyal, he would keep this secret if Kazuhira asked him to. He could see it in the young man’s carefully attentive face.

Had Kazuhira made the wrong choice?

Maybe. He’d certainly made a life’s worth of wrong choices.

But the fact was, he was on David’s side now, not Venom’s. And maybe that’s all he needed to know.

He did like David. It was almost like seeing Venom’s face but from some nonexistent Before. This face was untainted, still had some spirit and hope left. Kazuhira found himself wanting to preserve that.

“If you have to kill him, do it,” Kazuhira said firmly. “He… He’s not a bad man, but he’s fulfilling his destiny. And that means he’ll try to kill you. You understand?”

David clearly didn’t, but he nodded slowly anyway.

All at once, Kazuhira lurched forward, spilling drink on himself, and gripped David’s forearm with his free hand.

“Sometimes there isn’t right or wrong,” he said. “Sometimes in this world, all you can do is fight for your own survival against forces that would extinguish you. You have a mission here, David, but I need you to understand… You need to survive. You need to live.”

“I want to live,” David said, his face calm but his eyes dark and impenetrable with what must have been one helluva internal conflict.

Kazuhira had done this to him… If Kazuhira’s soul was lost already, the least he could do was protect David’s…

He hadn’t been able to protect V.

“I need you to live.”

“I will, Master.”

“Good.” 

Kazuhira forced a smile, but he could tell by the stoicism of David’s face that it didn’t look happy at all.

x

Kazuhira was long accustomed to his support role in missions, but the first day of Solid Snake’s landing in Zanzibarland made a long forgotten hatred for the work rise at the back of his throat like a bad taste.

He remembered nights on mother base when the Diamond Dogs were out in the field, when Venom was miles away under fire, and Kazuhira (“Kaz” back then) was holed up with a fresh hatred for his own body, a bilious conviction in his uselessness, and a radio.

A shadow of that feeling returned to Kazuhira now… His prosthetic arm itched, the phantom pain that he’d ignored for so long thrumming in his nerves until he took the damn thing off, sitting with his stump rather inelegantly still swaddled up and lined with prosthetic gel. He must have looked a wreck, but thankfully he was alone in his office, holed up with his Codec and a monitor of Solid Snake’s movements, charts of the compound, even a file on “Big Boss” with gaps that Kazuhira’s brain automatically filled… Name: John Sears. Incorrect. Venom’s name was a safely guarded treasure of Kazuhira’s, a name Venom himself had always needed reminding of… That had been Kazuhira’s duty, as his partner in every sense.

He hadn’t touched a drink in a few hours. This mission was too important, important enough even for painful sobriety.

As soon as Snake landed, of course he called Campbell, but unexpectedly this was followed by an immediate call to Master Miller as well.

“I’m in,” David said simply, as if to reassure him.

Kazuhira smiled wryly. “Godspeed.”

The unpredictability of the mission was almost predictable in itself, the many twists and turns and revised objectives. Even sitting in his office and simply keeping painstaking track of Snake’s progress was an exhausting task.

Kazuhira was on edge, boneless with fatigue, and a tension headache was pulsating in his forehead.

He’d been remembering so much the past few days.

At night still he sometimes became painfully aware of his own solitude, a strange realization of lack, of exactly what it felt like not to have arms wrapped around you and a heavy warmth on the other side of your bed. It was an aching, yearning loneliness. If Kazuhira were a more pathetic man he would wrap his arms around himself tightly just to try and create some illusion of intimacy. But for all his disgrace, he wasn’t that pitiful.

Instead he would sit on the edge of his bed blearily and sift through the memories, looking them in the eye before carefully filing them away at the back of his brain again, ever organized. Ignoring them only gave them more power.

That face.

That smile.

That man Kazuhira still, to this day, loved more than anything.

But that man didn’t entirely exist outside of his memories, not any more. The man Solid Snake would inevitably face was just a shadow of his former self.

No, not even that. He was a shadow of another man entirely.

Kazuhira realized his fist was clenched tightly on his desk and slowly uncurled his fingers, the joints white and stinging, gradually going red.

The Codec rang.

“Gray Fox is here,” David said.

There was a certain hollowness to his voice, in this message meant only for his mentor, and realization sank into Kazuhira’s bones. He and David were a lot alike, weren’t they?

“You know what you have to do,” Kazuhira said, more strictly than he might have hoped.

But David did know.

Kazuhira watched from a world away on a little monitor as two blinking dots came close together. It was almost laughable to imagine this was really two best friends preparing to kill each other.

Friendship of this sort, this simple deep devotion, was a powerful thing. It couldn’t be destroyed by something like death.

But unfortunately, human bodies were made of less durable stuff.

x

David lived.

Through all the political and personal entanglements, the final objective of this mission was the most basic and primal of all: survival.

Kazuhira watched unblinkingly as the blue speck denoting David on his monitor twisted its way through the corridors of Outer Heaven, blinking towards escape. He jimmied his prosthetic leg against the bottom of the desk, sparking little messages of almost-pain at that point of his knee where his scarred flesh met metal.

Where was “Big Boss”? Was it possible that David would make it back to his helicopter meetup without a direct confrontation?

No.

Kazuhira absolutely refused to allow himself that hope. He knew the sort of dreams that would destroy him.

Sure enough, he was right.

David’s position froze in a large room, and another spot appeared, the same as any of the others signifying enemies, but Kazuhira knew immediately who this was.

David still called him of all his support team, proving again his favoritism, and it was almost like Kazuhira was separated from himself, listening idly as Master Miller barked orders back to the staticy and frantic voice of David in the field amidst gunfire and scrambling footfalls.

“Master, I’m out of ammo.”

“Knowing you, you’ve got your cigarettes. That means you’ve got a lighter.”

“Master?”

“Get creative, Snake, this is survival 101.”

Master Miller was stock still in his seat, watching the dots slowly circle each other around obstacles in the room, listening to the dull white noise of the closed Codec.

Burning.

He was saved from the vision of Venom bursting into flames, but as he watched on the monitor he knew the moment it happened because the pinpoint enemy suddenly flew about the room erratically while David stayed huddled in a corner, frozen in place with his lighter and lacquer spray.

Kazuhira stared at the screen until it felt like the dim light was burning through his sunglasses. Was that his heartbeat pounding in his forehead, or just the headache? Was this body even his own, this reality really happening?

The dot finally slowed and stopped. It sat still in the center of the room, and David’s didn’t move either for a long time.

The Codec rang again.

“Good work,” said Master Miller before David got a chance to ask anything.

This was followed only by an unexpected silence.

“Snake.”

A rasping swear wrenched through the line, almost like a sob, and Kazuhira was hurtled back into his own skin like air getting knocked out of his lungs.

“Snake, are you hurt?”

“Fuck,” said David. He was breathing heavily. “Fuck, he’s dead…”

_No. Don’t tell me._

“Are you hurt?” Kazuhira repeated sharply.

“No, but… What he said to me…”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Kazuhira was suddenly pushing his chair back with his legs and one arm. “I don’t want to hear a damn thing, Snake, you’ve done it. Now move on.”

“His last words...”

“Stop.”

“Master, please!”

“SHUT UP!”

Kazuhira moved to get out of his chair but wound up trying to put weight on his phantom arm and fell heavy and hard to the ground. He swore, expecting a shout but instead his own voice came out so feeble, his face pressed into the floor. His sunglasses had gone clattering off somewhere.

David was still in his ear, distant but pleading. He needed support. Not just from Master Miller. He’d just burned a man alive, and he needed support from someone who’d always cared about what happened to the unlucky man behind the codename Snake.

But Kazuhira couldn’t.

How could he do anything?

He’d lost Venom once, lost that man he knew so intimately, but the finality of this second bereavement scraped raw at the insides of his chest. There was no hope any more. Venom could never come back from Big Boss, but even more than that he could never come back from the dead.

Death by burning alive… That agony… The screaming David must have heard…

Kazuhira opened his mouth, half expecting vomit, but instead he let loose a hopeless pleading wail into the carpet, a wet wrenching sob that he gave up every ounce of the air in his lungs for, until the muscles of his stomach were taut and aching. He screamed and he cursed, and without his sunglasses the room was too bright, and it was all blurred by tears, turning everything into a horrible wobbling world of swimming light.

Venom wasn’t only gone. He was dead.

He was dead.

He was dead.

Kazuhira had killed him through someone else’s hands.

“Please, Master….” Was David crying too? There was a horrible shake in his voice, his words growing fainter and frantic, like a lost child. “Please, I need you, don’t leave me, not now.”

Kazuhira choked, his heart hammering, his face wet and messy. He turned to press his forehead into the carpet, alleviating his cheek, and gripped the leg of his upturned chair with his hand.

“Master…!”

David needed him.

It was a horrible thing, to be needed. It meant you had to stay alive, remain in this world no matter how unbearable it was.

Very slowly and with great weakness, Kazuhira sat up. His breaths heaved and shook, all of him shook, like a fragile leaf.

But his head was held up, and finally he listened to what David was begging of him.

“I’m here,” he croaked. “Snake. I’ve got you.”

David made some indecipherable sound, something between relief and pain, and shakily Kazuhira stood, leaning heavily into his desk and staring down at the monitor.

“I’ve got you. You’re almost out.”

The tears kept running down his face but he guided David onward to safety, calmed the horror and anguish running rampant in his young pupil’s head.

This was his duty.

This was what Kazuhira had chosen to protect.

x

David looked older when Kazuhira saw him next after his return from Zanzibar, not older in the face but in the eyes. This time he accepted when Kazuhira offered him a drink in his quarters.

He accepted quite a few drinks.

They boozed themselves up in silence, sitting across from each other, and Kazuhira’s belly felt perpetually cold no matter how much hard alcohol he put in there. The lack followed him everywhere now, the lack of arms around him, the lack of a familiar voice in the halls, no rumbling laugh. Was this what people meant when they talked about ghosts? Being haunted by empty spaces?

He had failed his goal as well. He could see already that David had changed, that he wouldn’t live this mission down. It would be a scar on his life.

But he was alive, sitting here across from Kazuhira, throwing back drinks. Perhaps that counted for something.

“I’m sorry,” Kazuhira said finally.

David didn’t accept nor deflect the apology. Instead he put his current drink aside and left his chair, falling to his knees in front of Kazuhira, looking up at him solidly and putting a firm hand on his teacher’s knee.

“Thank you,” David said. His eyes were haunted now, by ghosts that weren’t even his own, but he still spoke with such sureness. “For being there with me.”

Kazuhira was grateful for his sunglasses. He felt in this moment that David’s gaze would pierce straight through to his soul without them.

“I’m here when you need me,” he promised. He couldn’t imagine David ever needing his fumbling brand of help and support again, but it was true. Kazuhira would always be at his side in an instant.

It was Kazuhira’s greatest flaw, perhaps. The one thing he’d always fought for most viciously was to stay beside the people he loved.

Unexpectedly, David smiled, a wry twist of a thing but with genuine fondness.

“There’s no one I’d rather be in a foxhole with than you,” he said.

Kazuhira laughed.

In that moment he wanted to reach out to David, but David wasn’t his son. It was somehow not allowed.

So instead Kazuhira drank, but when he’d drained his glass he came back up and started telling a story.

David went back to his chair and they talked about unimportant things, lighter things.

The pain of living, for this small moment, was manageable.

x

It was only four months later that Kazuhira found himself bundled up against an encroaching Alaskan winter, waiting outside an Anchorage airport. Actually going inside seemed formidable. Large crowds of people were daunting these days, as if he could feel the judgment of strangers on the back of his neck.

He hadn’t had a drop of whiskey in three days, and no matter how much caffeine he chugged, he still had a headache. With a frown, he checked his watch.

It had been very unexpected to get a phonecall earlier that week from his ex-wife.

“I need her to live with you.”

At the worst possible moment, fatherhood had decided to return to him.

It was… terrifying, frankly. Hadn’t he proven time and time again that he couldn’t touch a person without destroying them? Venom, David… Innocent people in their own right, and Kazuhira had clung to them until his knuckles went white yet they’d fallen inexorably into ruin anyway.

Kazuhira was not fit for a child. He did not want another chance at being a good man, not when the stakes were his daughter’s happiness.

But then he turned at precisely the right moment, and there was Nadine exiting the building, looking not entirely pleased to see him, but holding her hand was…

A little girl. With blond curls under a knit cap and big fat cheeks. How old was she now? Was she seven?

Her eyes lit up when she saw him. Somehow she looked at this despicable failure of a man, and she beamed and called “Daddy!”

And she ran to him.

Automatically, he fell to his knees and she leaped into a hug. It had been so long… She was taller, almost unrecognizable from the unsteady toddler he’d known before…

Her tiny hands curled in his coat. Her happiness was so absolute, so nonjudgmental. His arms wrapped around her of their own accord, loosely, and she grinned up at him with a gap between her teeth…

She was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen in this moment. The purest thing he’d ever seen…

“Daddy, what’s wrong?” she asked, smile faltering.

Tears had escaped from under his sunglasses and she wiped at them with her glove, pudgy hands at his cheeks.

“Nothing, Catie,” he said shakily. “I’m just so happy to see you.”

He somehow found himself smiling, almost in the vein of laughing at himself and what a fool he was, but Catherine took it as a good sign and smiled as well. He held her close and pressed his face into the puffy shoulder of her coat.

“I’m just so happy,” he told her.

Never let go.

Maybe that was his only skill.


	7. Archaeology!! (Snake/Otacon silly au)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> FOR TOBI! Happy belated birthday. One day I will stop being jazzed that you do archaeology, but today is not that day.
> 
> Summary: Silly Otasune AU where Snake is a rugged adventure movie archaeologist ala Indiana Jones and Hal is an actual archaeologist.

Hal’s students were in the hole, their t-shirt clad backs just visible hunched over their work, exchanging grossed-out noises at the Japanese beetle larva they kept accidentally cutting in half on their trowels. There were only two freshmen today, Sunny and Chico, as his other students had been stolen by Naomi for an out of state research trip. Hal was well-liked by his colleagues but had trouble holding the interest of the undergraduates. Maybe he was too over-eager, a little too nerdy, chatted too much in the sticky summer mugginess. In other words, maybe he was actually just an annoying and uncool person. But! Sunny and Chico were doing an excellent job.

Since it was only the three of them, that left Hal up at the screen, sifting their excavated dirt through a wire mesh set up haphazardly on two buckets, trying to catch any last tiny morsels of potsherds or bone. He was becoming so transfixed with pushing dirt clods through the little square wiring, the satisfying squish under his gardening gloved hand, that he almost didn’t notice a stranger hurrying down the path toward them.

Hal put on his most eager smile. They occasionally had curious folks walk up to the site to ask questions, and Hal was almost relieved for an opportunity to chatter without worrying about burdening Sunny and Chico with too much conversation. But any greeting died in his throat because… well, this approaching stranger looked ridiculous.

He was a stocky, muscular man in leather pants and some sort of sleeveless jacket, thrown open on a thoroughly sweaty white shirt. His hair was also spiked with sweat (Hal tried not to notice how it made his biceps glisten also), and his forehead was wrapped up tightly with a dark bandana that trailed down his neck.

He was running, and skidded to a stop mere feet from Hal’s position, so that Hal instinctively folded his skinny torso over the screen and held onto it tightly so it wouldn’t topple over should any impact occur. Instead, the mysterious man simply stood there, keeping his distance but staring at Hal in an unnerving, wild-eyed way.

He had some sort of tool belt as well, pouches and pockets and also a gun and also was looked like a whip, which wasn’t entirely comforting.

“C-can I help you?” Hal asked, gingerly straightening again, glasses askew. Sunny and Chico poked their heads up out of the hole and Hal mentally wondered if he would have to shield them from some sort of maniac.

The mystery man’s hard-jawed, stubbled face was intense but hard to read. “You need to get out of here,” he said, in a low growl.

“Excuse me?”

But before any further conversation could commence, Hal heard a great BANG in the distance and spun around to see a dark rumbling on the horizon from whence the mystery man had come. It was a mass of people, quickly approaching. They all somehow looked the same, but Hal couldn’t get a good look at them before Mystery Man bodily flipped the screen over, spraying dirt everywhere.

“Aah!” Hal squawked, already mourning the lab data hopelessly lost. Mystery Man then hefted up the screen like a shield, coming to crouch beside Hal defensively.

This protective stance seemed to come in the nick of time, because suddenly an onslaught of blue laser beams came shooting at the site. Sunny and Chico ducked into the hole again with yelps. Lasers were deflected from the screen held mere inches from Hal’s face, the Mystery Man grunting with the exertion of holding their makeshift shield in place one-handed. With his other hand, he fumbled his gun out of its holster, then like some sort of movie cowboy, he started shooting at the mass of people stampeding towards them.

These people were… If Hal didn’t know better, he’d say they weren’t human! They looked shriveled and gray, shooting blue lasers at them from outstretched hands en masse.

“Wh-what the hell are those?” Hal stammered. He hadn’t realized he was pressed so close to Mystery Man, nose filled with the ripeness of the other man’s sweat.

“Laser mummies!” Mystery Man barked.

“Mummies?”

“Yep, Egyptian,” Mystery Man explained rapidly and perhaps with some ire as he shifted back and forth for better shooting vantage points, knocking into Hal intermittently. “They were brought back to life using the Book of The Dead. Those rings they’re all wearing shoot lasers. The Rings of Ra. Ra is the Egyptian sun god, hence the lasers.”

There was a lot to process here, so much that all Hal could really come up with was, “But this is Illinois??”

“Get down!” Mystery Man’s elbow bodily shoved Hal’s head into the dirt as he threw aside his gun to unlatch something else from his belt. The mummies were close enough now that Hal could see their withered eyes and missing jaws… Mystery Man threw something at them, then ducked, his muscular body folding over Hal protectively.

BOOM!!!

It was some sort of grenade! The closest cluster of mummies went flying in an explosion of greenish smoke.

“Who are you?” Hal gasped as Mystery Man pulled back, their faces terribly close.

“I’m an archaeologist,” Mystery Man said ruggedly. “You can call me Snake.”

Then he scooped Hal up bridal style and ran leaping into the hole behind them. Sunny and Chico were crouched together there, holding their trowels like makeshift weapons amidst the slime of their Japanese beetle larva friends.

“Are you alright?” Hal asked them, as he was spilled rather unceremoniously from Snake’s beefy arms.

“What are they?” Sunny asked instead, as Snake for some reason took out his whip and cracked it a few times at the ready.

Hal again tried to process what Snake had told him and instead just shook his head. “I don’t know. Just you and Chico come get behind me!”

Snake swore as the shambling gray mummies quickly circled the edge of the hole on all sides, their bony hands (each sporting snazzy blue rings) pointing at the hapless archaeologists like guns… They were trapped and surrounded. Snake cracked his whip a few times in agitation but it was useless…

“Is there any way to talk to them?” Hal asked, trying to shield Sunny and Chico but to no avail.

“They won’t listen,” Snake said, spitting into the dirt. “The only way to stop em for good is to recite the reversal spell from the Book of the Dead, but the evil emperor took my copy…”

Hal didn’t have the wherewithal to ask about this evil emperor, but Sunny suddenly perked up, gripping Hal’s arm. “Oh! I know the Book of the Dead,” she squeaked.

Snake turned to her. “You memorize any of it?”

“Yeah, I had a huge Egyptology phase in middle school…”

“Quick! Recite everything you know!”

She did, loudly. The mummies must have sensed this danger because they started to ambush, shooting lasers and throwing themselves into the hole, clawing at Snake and Hal and the undergrads… Snake’s whip cracked loudly, then Sunny screamed out a final few words… And suddenly the mummies were gone! They burst into ashy smoke, falling like grayish snow over their heads.

“Oh no…” Hal said forlornly. “This’ll probably bury the hearth shape we found earlier…”

“Bury this,” said Snake, and abruptly he reeled Hal closer and crushed their lips together. It was the hottest kiss Hal had ever had in his entire life.

x

“Alright there, Hal?”

“Wha?” Hal snorted awake, blinking blearily through only one lens, his glasses were so crooked.

He’d fallen asleep in the campus library again. A good puddle of drool had accumulated on his human evolution textbook.

David, who had clearly just arrived, smirked and heaved his backpack onto another chair at the table. “Pulled an all-nighter again?” he asked casually, sitting beside Hal.

Hal got a whiff of David’s aftershave in the proximity and tried not to blush, slowly realizing exactly what he’d been dreaming about. David watched him, his face perhaps less immediately rugged than “Snake”s had been, clean shaven and clean in general, but the same shape, the same eyes… He quirked an eyebrow.

Hal must have been blushing pretty hard, but he could blame it on getting caught conked out. He adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat.

“Dinner in the caf in an hour?” he asked, voice wavering a little.

“Sure,” said David. “Drill me for my exam for a few questions and I can help with your essay.”

They did just that, shoulders touching comfortably.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hal is studying anthropology, David is studying history, they met in a Native American art history course x) Silly college fellas dreaming of grad school (and other things)


End file.
